‘Cuz they’re the girls.
Six-year-old Kiley competed in her first swimming event yesterday, winning a ribbon in the 25-meter freestyle.
Five-year-old Sofie continues to win ribbons in non sequiturs.
Veronica, Sofie’s mom: “I’m a Saggitarius, so what’s Sofie?”
Sofie: “Hilarious?”
“[The Earth’s] been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with.”
Arizona state Senator Sylvia Allen quoted at The Washington Monthly (they have the video).
“For that, we need something else. A superstar. A style-shaper. A person who could get whiny city kids not only to eat their vegetables, but to grow them.”
Timothy Egan writing about the need for Michelle Obama to save the national parks, where attendance has been in gradual decline. Go read what he has to say.
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
Henry David Thoreau, who was born 192 years ago today.
“When people take revenge, the same reward centers of the brain are activated that are associated with satisfying hunger, thirst, sexual appetite.”
Ian McEwan from a profile in The New Yorker
[I often wonder if the people I think about when I think about revenge realize that I’m still thinking about them.]
“Problem w/Professional Politicians:They’re more concerned w/holding a title in perpetuity than just accomplishing goals they promised voters”
Strangers are more likely to return lost wallets containing photos of cute babies, according to British researchers. The scientists sprinkled 240 wallets across Edinburgh last year with pictures of either a smiling baby, a puppy, a “happy family,” or a “contended elderly couple.” It turns out nobody cares about your pooch, retired parents, or smugly superior family life. But that cute wittle baby? Apparently it triggers a “compassionate instinct towards vulnerable infants that people have evolved to ensure the survival of future generations.”
George Herman “Babe” Ruth made his Major League debut, pitching for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway 95 years ago today.
Ruth held Cleveland to five hits in six innings and got the win. He was 0 for 2 at the plate.
He was 19-years-old.
Just this last year [Stewart Udall] rafted down the Colorado River from Lees Ferry — named for Udall’s grandfather — and, with a grandson, trekked from the floor of the Grand Canyon up Bright Angel Trail some 7,000 feet to the South Rim. His family had cautioned against it, and he rejected a Park Service offer of a mule. “They wouldn’t have liked it if I hadn’t made it,” he recounted, “but what a way to go.” Once at the South Rim, Udall marched straight to the bar at the Tovar Lodge and ordered a martini.
Udall was 84 when the above took place. Stewart Udall was Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He is the father of New Mexico’s junior U.S. senator Tom Udall.
From a 2005 Los Angeles Times profile of Udall.
The duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was 205 years ago this morning. Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow wrote about the duel five years ago. Here are the essentials, but the whole piece is worth reading.
Two hundred years ago today, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton squared off in a sunrise duel on a wooded ledge in Weehawken, N.J., above the Hudson River. Burr was vice president when he leveled his fatal shot at Hamilton, the former Treasury secretary, who died the next day in what is now the West Village of Manhattan. New Yorkers turned out en masse for Hamilton’s funeral, while Burr (rightly or wrongly) was branded an assassin and fled south in anticipation of indictments in New York and New Jersey. To the horror of Hamilton’s admirers, the vice president, now a fugitive from justice, officiated at an impeachment trial in the Senate of a Supreme Court justice.
…So Hamilton, at 49, decided to expose himself to Burr’s fire to prove his courage, but to throw away his own shot to express his aversion to dueling. He gambled that Burr would prove a gentleman and merely clip him in the arm or leg — a wager he lost. With Hamilton’s death, America also lost its most creative policymaker. (The murder indictments against Burr petered out, and he died a reclusive old man in 1836.)
Seeking to regain political power after the duel, Burr allegedly led an expedition to establish an independent nation along the Mississippi River, separating territories from the United States and Spain. He was charged with treason but acquitted.
It’s a fine album.
“With Motown Records celebrating its 50th anniversary, the Free Press went for the gold. Our staff traveled literally coast to coast uncovering stories that demonstrate the label’s continued relevance.”
I watched just the first three of the 50 videos (3-6 minutes each) and found them fascinating.
First mistake: Eating Bing cherries while using the laptop.
Second mistake: Letting a sloppy cherry pit fall onto the laptop keyboard.
Third mistake: Setting the laptop on the floor.
Fourth mistake. Forgetting that ants can find anything anywhere.
What does one do with a slightly ant-infested laptop?
“President Obama says he wants a health care bill on his desk by October. So I sent him the one for my kid’s appendectomy.”
Todd Long
Watch the video by clicking on the right-facing triangle. Then quickly enlarge it to full screen (click on the far right button). 30 seconds. Just watch.
Five kids were in the black Ford, ages 14-21 and driven by a 19-year-old who’s license was suspended the day before for poor driving.
All five were killed — this near Detroit on Thursday.
In fact, this decision comes after much consideration, and finally polling the most important people in my life – my alternate personalities (where the count was unanimous… well, in response to asking: “Want me to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our future from OUTSIDE this blog?” It was four “yes’s” and one “hell yeah!” The “hell yeah” sealed it – and someday I’ll talk about the details of that…
Or maybe I’ll just take the rest of the day off and float downstream.
Jake LaMotta, the boxer portrayed by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, is 88 today.
Alice Munro is 78.
She has written 11 books of short stories, and a new collection, Too Much Happiness, which comes out later this year. In May, Alice Munro won the Man Booker International Prize.
She said: “It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‘Read,’ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‘Don’t read, don’t think, just write,’ and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you’re going to be a writer you’ll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think ‘There must be something else people do,’ you won’t quite be able to quit.”
Lolita, the actress Sue Lyon, is 63 today.
Arlo Guthrie is 62.
Bela Fleck is 51.
Adrian Grenier is 33 today.
Jessica Simpson is 29.
Arthur Ashe, the first black man to win a major tennis championship, was born on this date in 1943. Ashe won Wimbledon, the U.S. and Australian Opens. He died from pneumonia, a complication of AIDS, in 1993. He contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion during surgery (not altogether uncommon before the disease was understood).
Marcel Proust was born on July 10th in 1871. His fame is based on the novel The Remembrance of Things Past — À la recherche du temps perdu is actually better translated In Search of Lost Time and that has become in recent years the more common title. Jane Smiley belongs to that tiny group that has read the entire 3,000-page work — she wrote about her experience for Salon in 2005. A brief excerpt from her story:
[I]t is time for you to begin, because reading all of Proust is not hard.
First, you buy all seven volumes in a uniform edition — mine came in a six-book set — and you arrange them in a row next to your bed, the bathtub or your favorite chair, wherever you are most comfortable reading. For a few days, let’s say no longer than a week, you glance at them from time to time and pick them up and look at the covers. You can even flip the pages — but don’t read anything. You are familiarizing yourself with this new acquaintance. You are coming to recognize his appeal. You are letting him impose upon you, because for the next 70 days or so, you are going to organize your free time around him.
My mother’s uncle, and her guardian, was born in Conlogue, Illinois, on this date in 1888. I knew him as Grandpa, usually written as G’pa.
A salesman through most of his career, after tough times during the Depression he established a successful insurance agency in Detroit in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite his success, his office was in the dining room, then in the second bedroom of a small apartment — a great place for a little boy to play “office”.
G’pa was a conservative, staid almost austere man. His favorite activity — other than work — was telling “stories” (jokes we would call them), none of which were ever off color and a few I can still remember hearing. He was good at the telling and no doubt that was part of his success in sales. Ironically though, it didn’t seem to serve him well in the Army, a time of his life he particularly disliked — but then he was a 29-year-old draftee.
Lee Cook sold the insurance agency when he was in his early 70s, but couldn’t retire. He continued trying to sell this or that, without much success. It was sad to see him so frustrated. (I learned then that I should have a blog when I retired to keep me busy.)
Grandpa’s been gone more than 35 years now, but I still miss him.
… Death Valley.
On this date in 1913, the hottest temperature ever reported in North America was recorded at the Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, California. 134º (56.7ºC) … in the shade.
Veronica, one of the two official daughters-in-law of NewMexiKen, posted this photo taken from their location this weekend in Colorado. Sigh.
No way to set this one from dooce up without just copying the whole thing, so you’ll just have to click.
And don’t miss Daily Chuck.
PORTLAND, Ore. — A check-cashing store employee was still recovering at an area hospital Thursday after a Comcast employee attacked and robbed her, police said.
At about 10:45 a.m. Wednesday, the man walked into the Ace Checks Cashed on Southeast 73rd Avenue and Powell Street, where he attacked and robbed a woman who works in the store, police said. Officers have identified the employee as 37-year-old Nicole Loundree, of Portland.
Workers at a nearby business said they noticed something suspicious at the check-cashing store and then saw a man in a Comcast uniform rush out and leave in a Comcast van.
He was arrested shortly thereafter.
That is WAY TOO CLOSE to SnoLepard’s house. What kind of a neighborhood do you live in Bro?
Now that Sen. Coburn (R-OK) has said he will not answer any questions about his conversations with Sen. Ensign (R-NV) because he was acting as his physician (and spiritual counselor), TPM Reader DE reminds us that Dr. Coburn is an OB/Gyn.
A deeper scandal than we’d ever imagined?